About This Post

The attentive among you may have noticed an erratic posting schedule and tendency to post from Croydon. You may even have noticed a brief, cryptic mention of London.There is, of course, a perfectly good explanation for all this. Someone was foolish enough to offer me employment; and I was foolish enough to accept.

The people crazy enough to take me on are EngDesign* (pronounced enj–design rather than E–N–G–Design, though the latter does get used), where I’m now an Assistant Engineer. They (or, I suppose, I can now say we) are a firm of consulting building services engineers. That’s the lighting, thermal environment (heating, air-conditioning, etc), plumbing, data, power and the like which make a building usable and, importantly, comfortable. As someone who’s always had something of an interest in buildings, and how they shape us (see, for instance, my love of castles), it’s interesting stuff—especially given that consultants tend to get the more interesting end of the spectrum to look at. It’s also challenging, being something of a direction change from ultra high vacuum surface physics (every time someone mentions a pressure I have a heart attack. One Bar!!). I think my physics background is good training though. I can handle the technical aspects, and the rigour that’s sometimes required (though I’m still getting used to the engineering approach of adding 20% ;-) ). I think there are areas where I’ll be able to apply it to better understanding the principles once I’ve got a grasp of all the basics, and hopefully my physics knowledge will then be able to make some sort of valuable contribution.

Of course while the fact everything is new is exciting and challenging it’s also frustrating. Not knowing the way to approach a lot of stuff can be maddening, especially when it so obviously ties back into basic physics principles (though it’s probably a while since I touched those too!) It’s a bit of a jolt to go from asking questions that maybe no-one knows the answer to, to asking those which you feel everyone knows but you (this is of course something of a broad brush exaggeration).

There are other disadvantages too. I do miss pure physics. Commuting isn’t fun. I’ve realised just how many things you don’t think about owning, until you realise you don’t own them. London (where the EngDesign offices are) and Croydon (where my flat is) are a long way from Gateshead, where my parents, cat, and, very importantly, Janet are. How the hell trains can be that expensive to go up and down the East Coast line is beyond me. What’s more beyond me is why a standard single costs very nearly as much as the return ticket. Basically, broken.

I’ll probably post more about those challenges, opportunities, and difficulties when I have a chance (another disadvantage of work is obviously the lack of time!). I wanted to finally get round to the “this is what I’m doing” post though, given that I started back in October (which due to the rush of excited newness seems forever ago). If nothing else I don’t really feel comfortable publishing anything else until that’s done for some reason.

*I got a bit of a shock looking at the EngDesign website when linking it up just now. It didn’t used to look like that. It’s been very recently changed. And, yes, I’m willing to bet never checked in anything but IE—some of it is a bit broken in Firefox. I’m not too sure how much I should criticise, as the new boy, and it does look nicer than the old site. Still a mess of nested tables and font tags though :-(

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